Postage meters are well known. The present assignee has been designing and manufacturing postage meters for many, many decades. After these decades of experience, postage meters are extremely reliable and cost has been reduced to a minimum. A typical postage meter prints its postage by means of an intaglio-type metal or strong plastic printing plate or die plate, using specified fluorescent ink.
Most postage meter customers never have reason to call for repair of their postage meters. Postage meters are simple to operate and there is little to go wrong. They have been accepted by nearly all the post offices of the world. Postage meters benefit post offices by reducing the need for retail sales of postage stamps, and by making it easy for postal patrons to adjust to changes in postage rates. Present-day postage meters are able to accommodate mail pieces of varying thickness, and are able to print their indicia even if the surface of the mail piece is uneven.
Nothwithstanding the reliability, low cost, and ease of use of present-day postage meter designs, it has been suggested by some postal authorities that all postage meters presently in use be removed from service and that postage be printed instead by common computer printers using ordinary ink. This means that anyone with an ordinary computer printer can readily generate a plausible-looking postal indicium at any time and in any desired quantity. The only possible approach for reducing fraud, when ordinary computer printers are used, is to incorporate cryptographically secure information into the postal indicium, and to read and verify that information on each and every mail piece. The present invention is directed to system configurations in which such cryptographically secure information is generated for use in printing such indicia. To be commercially viable, such system configurations must not only satisfy the requirements of the postal authorities, but must also provide user function more or less approximating that of present-day postage meters.